Dear Mr Collie,I stand with you, shoulder to drooping jaw, heart to perforated heart, in this time of your sadness. I do not claim any particular talent in the provision of solace, nor indeed in the difficult soulshare of tribulation.Fear not. For we are as brethren and the blood-tie of desperation leaves traces indelible. While suns have scorned the very essence of your soul I remained the lone satellite orbiting with singular fascination around you. I am the dark star. But long have you turned from the heavens, no?I am six, or thereabouts, an age filled of superheroes and careless though painful experiments with gravity. I leave the swing determined to fly. Gravity plunges my teeth through my lower lip as I hit the ground. I cannot remember crying, though surely there must have been tears. That is the way. The tears we remember are those that flow on the inside of the soul, not the body. I collided not with mere Tasmanian earth but with the reality that every human must be called to its own account.I am fourteen. Because I choose to play soccer I am a wog, a poofter, a sheila, a reffo, a non-child, an unAustralian. The bully arrives with perfect timing at every break period to clip my head with the sharp outswing of his locker door. I cannot fight him because my father is the school principal. He cannot flog me on open ground because my father is the school principal. He spits quietly on my text books. I retain these DNA samples for years, curious shapes on the pages of Biology and Mathematics. He is an amoeba. I am lost.I am eighteen. I move to the city to attend university. I am clever, popular in a rah-rah-the-ratbag kind of way, energetic organiser of parties and student functions. A series of two-week girlfriends exhaust me. I hide my sadness and peel away from them in frustration. I share it and they pass me for the joie de vivre of Easy Joe and his six-pack on the beach. I write poems I can't be bothered to publish. They are rubbish, of course. Any concept of who I might really be is still buried in the piles of autumn leaves on Royal Parade or torn apart by the scything southerlies of August.Enough of me, for I was old before I was ever young.Tell me about yourself, Mr Collie. Did you yawn in the presence of angels whilst secretly beseeching them to record the tenor of every heartbeat? Did you propagate tomatoes only to watch every plump and promising fruit wither on the vine? I have met you. You were on the bus in Italy when the driver falsely accused you of groping a woman whose phone had inadvertently vibrated in her handbag. You collected empty bottles and sold them to nobody behind the market in Ekaterinburg, pride skewed in the light skittering through a soldier-line of brown glass. After the stockmarket crash you hung your head because you and your unmentionable greed was responsible. You were the leper crossing the Canal Road in Jakarta, stumps splinted to packing-crate planks as you dived through the traffic. You held the folder containing the document for the Minister to sign and sell-out his principles, waiting politely for that succinct curse of ink. You were guilty vehicles thirsty for fuel. You were tides slapping at patience's dour breakwater. I hated you because you were too me, too much fountain drowning in rain. You were horizon smashed into uploadable sunscapes. You were the needle and the stolen flame. You! You are dust in a world of Ezi-Kleen. You are the well-trodden path of comfortable blame. You are malleable because the Sadness has myriad forms. You are, at best, a corpo reductio, nothing. In your nothingness you are compelled, by forces even greater than I can muster, to confront the baffling sastrugi of Everything. Yet, shackled by misery's malarial malice, you move on.I am twenty-five. Casually I consider myself a junior centenarian, as if one-quarter bitterly held down is a recipe for the other three. It wasn't. The wife was a stranger, the children adorable and impossible, the pressure a stone-crushing mill grinding black afternoon to a dismal powder that could only suffocate the survivor of tormented nights. I was winged by the gunsmoke of my own friendly fire.Do you know what it is like to watch trains? Trains have somewhere to go. They arrive on time or late, neat or decrepit, but with the resounding clank of inevitability. They depart with bright passengers pressed to windows or travellers bridging continents from backpack and bottle. But they go; there is speed and movement, there is a whiff of credible certainty. You have never been a train, my friend, and nor have I.I am thirty-five. The divorce is a piece of paper. If I smudge it with the depth of my weeping, the Department of Broken Lives will produce another copy. I remember friends who once were friends and are now paralysed with doubt, as if the price of an ex-wife is becoming an ex-citizen.Have you spoken with the sea today? Have you been to the waves with your little cup and, instead of pity, demanded a god-damn ablution? I saw your prints on the sand, heading in one direction only. I was beside you yet you saw me not. The sea-eagles wheel in concentric mystery now and forever time, feathers and footsteps forlorn as dank decay.I am forty. I experiment with other countries as a panacea to my lack of identity. The stifling loneliness of modern Spanish sculpture is identical to a New Year's Eve in Austria where the hotelier's proud firework falls failing in the snow. I flirt with Finland, finding forests perfect for screaming. They will be woodchips one day.Hello, salute, hola, g'day, ciao, zdravo, salaam and priviyet. I keep you in my pocket. While the rat-catchers, the signwriters, the rusty bicycle-racks of urban-scheming, the blistering sunsets, the pensioners redolent of unwatered violets, the wide-awake dying, the thrusting joggers alternating feet of narcissism and health, the bone-boiling soupmakers, the wary, the three-legged dogs of no particular species, the times that Dylan couldn't a-change, the ceramic pots handmade by factory-fodder in China, the pith and puckle, the dawn-reaching streetlights and all other beings of fibre and dross bow in dismay, I stand by you. I stand. Sad man, sad woman, sad child of any nation, detach your weary arms and wrap them around me. I will stand; I withstand.Salt of truth, you are my only, ever, heart.I would ask you the bare favour of counting the final beats ... yet the sadness is infinite.Yours in the beyond, untrammeled, irreducible.B